Art Dubai 2026: Presenting Layla Juma, Armin Najib, Sara Al Haddad, Alia Hussain Lootah and Najat Makki
This year, Aisha Alabbar Gallery presents Soft Lines, Strong Currents, a dialogue between five artists whose practices converge around ideas of intimacy, materiality, and transformation. The presentation unfolds as a multi-generational conversation between abstraction, tactility, and motion, where the emotional and structural, the spiritual and material, coexist in quiet tension.
Through painting, sculpture, textile, and kinetic form, each artist explores how gesture, rhythm, and surface can hold memory, emotion, and vulnerability. Their distinct material vocabularies reveal how form becomes a vessel for reflection, care, and connection, tracing the unseen currents that shape the human experience. Collectively, these works offer a contemplative exploration of the delicate balance between strength and softness, presence and feeling, and the enduring poetry of everyday life.
Dr. Najat Makki (UAE) anchors the presentation as one of the country’s most influential modern artists. Her new body of work continues her long-standing exploration of color as both a sensory and spiritual language. Through glowing layers of pigment and shifting chromatic fields, Makki transforms her canvases into meditative environments that bridge nature, perception, and metaphysical reflection. Her works evoke the pulse of desert light and the spiritual energy of the landscape, reaffirming her pioneering role in shaping the visual language of Emirati abstraction.
Sara Al Haddad (UAE) expands her dialogue with vulnerability and healing through soft sculptural forms made of yarn, thread, and handwoven fibers. For Art Dubai 2026, she will present new pieces that continue her textile-based inquiry into containment, release, and emotional resilience, translating internal states into spatial forms that invite both reflection and empathy.
Alia Hussain Lootah (UAE) presents a new selection of sculptures and drawings exploring the evolving emotional and psychological dynamics of motherhood in contemporary life. Her works transform personal reflection into universal narratives of connection, dependency, and love. Using tactile materials such as clay, wires, resin, and mixed media, Lootah shapes minimal, organic forms that express the delicate balance between strength and vulnerability, creating poetic meditations on care, intimacy, and continuity.
Layla Juma (UAE) bridges her architectural background with a sculptural sensibility that investigates geometry, rhythm, and the invisible structures of balance. Her new works reexamine form as a spatial language that exists between precision and emotion, repetition and stillness. Through carefully constructed compositions, Juma reveals the unseen relationships that connect structure and experience.
Armin Najib (Iran) introduces a kinetic dimension to the presentation, drawing inspiration from his Wall Series exhibited at The Sima Collective in Dubai. In these new works, Najib combines his engineering background with an intuitive approach to movement and magnetism. His sculptural compositions merge mechanical precision with emotional sensitivity—transforming energy, motion, and force into metaphors for human connection and the unseen systems that shape our environment.
Together, these artists articulate a shared vocabulary of touch, movement, and reflection, each contributing to a broader conversation on how material and emotion intersect in contemporary practice. The presentation reaffirms the gallery’s commitment to championing artists whose work merges conceptual depth with formal experimentation, offering a poetic exploration of how art can translate the invisible currents of feeling, memory, and transformation into tangible form.
Aisha Alabbar Gallery at Art Dubai 2026
Soft Lines, Strong Currents
Dubai, UAE
Aisha Alabbar Gallery is delighted to present Soft Lines, Strong Currents, a multi-generational presentation for Art Dubai 2026 bringing together Sara Al Haddad, Layla Juma, Najat Makki, Alia Hussain Lootah, and Armin Najib.
Unfolding as a nuanced dialogue between material, emotion, and form, the exhibition explores how softness and strength coexist not as opposites, but as interdependent forces shaping human experience. Through painting, textile, sculpture, and kinetic form, the presentation invites viewers into a contemplative space where intimacy becomes structure and gesture becomes language.
At the heart of the presentation is a sensitivity to material transformation. Each artist employs their medium not merely as form, but as a vessel holding memory, tension, and quiet resonance.
Sara Al Haddad’s like the fairytale (2026), a delicately hand-crocheted structure composed of tissue paper, suspends fragility in space. Its translucent, lace-like surface evokes something both tender and ephemeral—an object that feels as though it could dissolve at any moment, yet holds itself together through labor, repetition, and care. The work becomes a poetic meditation on vulnerability, where softness carries an unexpected resilience.
In contrast, Layla Juma’s Clustered Houses I & II (2026) translates her architectural sensibility into rhythmic painted compositions. Built through layers of acrylic, her forms suggest quiet accumulations of structures that echo memory, habitation, and invisible systems of connection. The repetition of shapes creates a sense of stillness and balance, while subtly alluding to the emotional architectures we inhabit.
Najat Makki’s new series of paintings, anchored by works such as Untitled 228 (2026), radiates chromatic intensity. Expansive fields of acrylic unfold across the canvas, where color becomes both atmosphere and energy. Her luminous palette recalls the shifting light of desert landscapes, transforming the surface into a meditative field that oscillates between the physical and the spiritual. The painting is less an image than an experience—immersive, rhythmic, and deeply sensory.
Alia Hussain Lootah’s practice unfolds as an ongoing exploration of the emotional and psychological dimensions of motherhood in contemporary life. Across a new selection of sculptures and drawings, she transforms personal reflection into something more universal, tracing themes of connection, dependency, and love. Working with tactile materials such as clay, wire, resin, and mixed media, Lootah develops minimal, organic forms that carry a quiet physical presence. Her sculptural works, including What lives between walls (2026), suggest both structure and openness—spaces that hold and reveal at once. This sensibility extends into her works on paper, where line and form echo the same delicate balance between strength and vulnerability through repetition. Together, the series reads as poetic meditations on care, intimacy, and continuity, where what is felt is often as important as what is seen.
Armin Najib’s SILISUM series adds a kinetic dimension that explores the invisible forces that shape movement and interaction. Through steel, magnets, glass, and wood, his vertically oriented sculptures create subtle, shifting relationships between balance and instability. The works respond to unseen magnetic forces, embodying motion that feels both engineered and organic. In their precision and unpredictability, they mirror the invisible systems—emotional, physical, and relational—that govern our environment.
Together, these works form a cohesive yet deeply layered presentation. Threads of tactility, rhythm, and transformation move across the exhibition, linking each practice through a shared sensitivity to process and perception. What emerges is not a singular narrative, but a field of quiet intensities, where viewers are invited to slow down, to notice, and to feel.
Soft Lines, Strong Currents ultimately reflects Aisha Alabbar Gallery’s commitment to artists who navigate the intersection of conceptual depth and material exploration. The presentation offers a poetic meditation on how art can render the intangible visible, tracing the currents of memory, emotion, and connection that shape our lived experience.
Written by Raymund Salinel
